Maria Joseph and the Hills Like. . . .

Del Darlson leaned on his shovel and watched the muddied water burble across the dry alfalfa field. What it murmured he could not say, but he heard the unmistakable laughter of a certain young woman. Above him the clouds unraveled and reraveled the shape of her face, her long slender arms, an angle of her walking hips. He had never noticed before how the haze-softened curves of the hills were the natural shape of a maiden’s breasts. But there they were, and he was suddenly empty with the fullness of all of it. The coy clouds, the hills like her mounded breasts, the murmuring water, his own hard lust, and his despair of ever being any part of the atmosphere Maria Joseph sunned—all of it was so much of a muddle that it fogged all but the one thing it was, a great thunderhead of hurt he could not heal, and did not want to.